How to Leverage Imagination

2/20/2013 1:17AM

Tedmed curator Jay Walker talks about the history of great ideas and shows off an illustrated book woven entirely in silk--a breakthrough marketing tool pitching an 18th-century revolution in loom technology.

This transcript has been automatically generated and may not be 100% accurate.

... work's ... Networks scalable that works is the topic or any given scene and say what you have for us ... well ... hell ... lot like the start was scalable networks so what makes an Networks scalable well ... right off the bat something has to grow quickly ... and ... skillful networks pretty much begin with the jet car gloom ... and what happens with the Jack our global tilted up here is these cards here for the first time in history ... you have one machine a punch card ... controlling another machine Alan so literally ... you can happen network effect when you can start to have a machine that's in control of another machine what you're we talking about so this is around eighteen thirty you're really getting a punch card ... they are really dirty appearing here is a spectacular example of what happens when you have a punch card technology ... the shocker loom company had a problem ... nobody wanted to buy their very expensive loan is so what they did was they wrote a program ... of fifty thousand of those punch cards and the Wolf ... of book in silk ... in eighteen eighty six there is no printing in this book don't ... every page in this book ... is walls and in so the illustrations the pictures ... it's a prayer book and the reason they did it ... was the company gave it to the wines of the textile mill owners ... them those wives would turn to their husbands and say ... can you print this on your looming he would say no and guess what they sold another loom I know how many of those books that they've we hope they don't know but only twenty about survive in the world today ... so now we take the punch card ... and we bring it forward in time ... today s which is the IDM a column punch card ever wonder why this punch card is the science ... here's the exact reason ... U S currency in the eighteen eighties was exactly the size ... and when the holler if the company wanted to ... sell material to the census of the U S in a what they did ... they imagine if they could chose to make a card the exact size of the U S currency ... it would fit into the sorting machines ... so the punch cards size exactly matches eighteen eighty U S currency ... and that's what was born and stayed that way and stay that way until the end of punch cards ... so we talk about Skillful networks the first grade scalable network starts ... with really the railroads ... and that this is a prospectus right here ... for selling bombs for the first ... in a broad national railroad and ... folded of the original owners to take the speck settling ... in here you can see what we turned around to viewing ... it ... this is the U S transcontinental railroad ... and this is the map that is in this prospectus to sell bonds ... because nobody could imagine where robots being ... sold in the perspective this folds out an entire where a road map in fact the only a regional rail road maps we have ... are from the financial prospectuses ... to sell the bonds ... now when you get from that railroad network and it seems a bit of problem was selling some of those bonds by the way they had a lot of challenges in the red but this this would have to go into those middle ... it ... was all of the journalism the goats but ... so ... we take a look at that and we go to the next certain network that scales ... and that's the Telegraph ... so here we have a regional photo ... of the first Telegraph in the history of the world along with the bill of sale for this Telegraph right here ... so ... here in the unilaterally the donor the Telegraph very lazy when gained thirty eight is going to be eighteen thirty eight ... Morse in advance this idea of being able to communicate in the distance ... and the scalable network Telegraph in its time was the intranet of that age ... so ... we don't think about electric be any more mobile we yesterday we saw the transatlantic Telegraph cable ... the beer is the first scalable network right there with the Telegraph ... and then ... we go from the Telegraph ... to the telephone ... and here's what I drop down to pick from the telephone ... this is the phone directory ... trickier ... for the entire state of California Oregon and Washington the entire western United States three giant states California forces with August ... eighteen ninety nine ... and here you have all forty seven thousand phone subscribers ... in the entire western United States ... from the year eighteen ninety nine ... so from eighteen ninety nine to nineteen ninety nine or nineteen hundred if you will two thousand ... the phone goes from forty seven thousand people in western California ... to miss a myriad of ... forty five million people ... that would be a steal the network ... and we talk about scalable network's of course ... we can't leave out the computer ... so what I brought from up the exhibition across the hall here ... is the first chipset ... basically the first Intel four thousand and four this is the first computer and chip ... and its nineteen seventy one ... so forty two years ago the computer revolution as we know starts ... with this set up by content and the power of those ships compared to ... something of similar size well maybe it's these chips are appointed oh six MIPS ... we polled six Mr. walk as you know ... and that's ... can be ... so bad mixes million instructions per second so um let's put it this way a person a bicycle pretty much knew this ... but ... now what exit from the air and a skillful network is a symbol ... what it looked like before that ... here is a piece of an up or memory board ... from a nineteen sixty one IBM computer ... if we zoom in here ... what this is is a grid ... and at the intersection of this grid ... our little circles of copper ... each circle is one bit ... of information ... so he gets to a bike ... this is about two hundred bytes of information in nineteen sixty one and ... two with bikes ... know your phone is you know megabytes in gigabytes million and billion bytes ... but one physical memory had to be ... little a screen door of a house ... you can see exactly what it meant for network to scale from here ... to hear ... of course ... for scalable networks you can't beat this one ... could ... those your old enough remember this this is the first cellular phone ... the Dinah tactics of Motorola Dynan Tech from nineteen eighty one ... in the no problems ... the brackets up in the pocket but this is a movie prop nowadays but it is a regional diner tactful ... so ... now in the world seventy five some of the world's people have a cellphone that's a little over four billion ... mobile phones today ... of about billion in a half phones are sold a year ... and pretty soon ... you'll have to know ten or twenty billion phones was the phone so be it clothing in all ... J talk a little bit about why scalable networks are so important in the history of the imagination and innovation while ... imagination ... right it's about in large part connectivity ... it's about saying hi ... I have an idea or share with other people when get reaction from other people were talk to customers to see with customers say ... so ... a scalable network allows you to take your imagination and leverage ... in a few sitting alone in your house by yourself in the woods ... Italy imagination you want to go one any puts ... was scalable network changes is the vector by which we move imagination ... you hear people all the time in the sciences especially the medical sciences talk about a matter of seconds ... you can get answers to problems that in many cases used to take ten years or ... or or or or even longer ... or somebody would have something in a research library halfway around the world ... you couldn't get it ... you know what an eighteen year-old ... university has more access to information ... and innovative ideas ... in the press the night so it's had ten years so it's really scalable networks that of all while the incredible art explosion acceleration of ... of innovation ... it really has affected because scalable network in the world is the one between your ears ... when you think about that from the time of conception to the time of birth for a hundred billion neurons as many stars as there are the Milky way galaxy ... are in between your two ears and then ... as is you are born the stock a wire up and connect ... biology shows us these extraordinary metaphors of the power of connection ... purists or revoke or tax a very small part of your overall brain is still about connections ... and the richness of our capacity in our experience is how many connections we make between on Iran is ... not how many neurons week to ... teach nor on has on average over ten ... thousand connections ... hundred billion neurons ... you do the math there is a law to connect the fast lane and that of course is the key to the next panel